


the world seen only by the gods

by erzi



Category: Natsume Yuujinchou | Natsume's Book of Friends
Genre: M/M, do not let the rating fool u this is Gayngst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-05-01 19:00:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19183780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erzi/pseuds/erzi
Summary: Shuuichi's fingernails gouge crescent moons into his palms, wanting them to be painted in blood. Needing it. A distraction from the suffocating emptiness resonating in his head. Something tangible to pinpoint as the source of pain. Something that isn't Matoba Seiji causing him to be so lost yet again.The Matoba clan has persisted through the ages by power and blood. New leaders rise at their predecessors' deaths, on and on forever more. As long as there are youkai, the Matoba clan will there be. And as long as there is a world, there will be youkai.





	the world seen only by the gods

The procession, bells ringing, flutes whispering, trails after the bride and groom robed in colors pure as night. The red torii they walk under receives them with wooden arms outstretched in elation at the sanctity it guards. It's a beautiful affair, Shuuichi privately admits. And he's not the only one who's stopped to admire it. He can't help a smile watching the scattering of youkai along the steeped steps leading to the torii, their eyes transfixed on these humans in elegant choreography dally with a realm beyond their recognition.

"Vicarious wishes?" comes a voice behind him, a voice that permeates his dreams and nightmares, a voice that sends burrowing ants down his spine. He does not need to look upon their face to know who speaks.

The only thing Shuuichi moves is his mouth, dwindling to a flat line. "No."

Seiji takes the last steps he needs to reach Shuuichi's side. His parasol is open at a jaunty angle, false eye pointed at the forest to their right. His lips are stretched to something as mocking as his tone, as keen as his singular eye. "Not even a little?"

Shuuichi, glowering, stuffs his hands in his pockets. "I just think it's pretty," he says, bumping into Seiji's shoulder (unintendedly, and how it burns) as he walks down the stone stairwell, skipping every other step in his hurry to leave.

Seiji follows (unfortunately, and how Shuuichi's heart skips of its own), feet soundless and nimble. "It's rude to leave a conversation like that."

"We're not conversing."

"Oh? Then what do you call this?"

Shuuichi opens his mouth to reply something biting, something dismissive. He cannot think of anything.

There is life out there tucked into strange nooks of the Earth, undiscovered and nameless. He and Seiji are not unknown to each other. Far, far from it. But there is no name to what they are, to anything they have. They are just them.

Seiji's chuckle, soft with self-satisfaction, bristles in Shuuichi's ears.

"Why are you here?" Shuuichi blurts, to get that terrible and lovely sound away from him.

"For the same reason I'm sure you're here." He spins the parasol in his hands idly. "We come when called like particularly well-trained dogs."

Shuuichi hums noncommittally, reserving his surprise at Seiji's deprecating remark for himself.

"However." Seiji's smug pride settles back on his face. "I can't say I've had reports of the youkai being sighted at the top of the shrine."

There are three things Shuuichi wants to say at once:

 _And you care what_ _I do_ _..._ _why_ _?_

_I heard bells and thought it might be the youkai._

_Why did_ you _come up here, too?_

What he goes with is another noncommittal hum.

Seiji suddenly stops walking, and even though they have not come here together, Shuuichi finds himself stopping as well.

"The view's very nice up here," Seiji says, eye on the sleepy town nestled at the bottom of the valley, green fields and purple mountains and blue sky gentle on the horizon. "Did you look at it from the top of the stairs? It must be even nicer there."

Shuuichi doesn't know where Seiji is headed with this, and carefully answers, "No. I was watching the wedding procession."

Seiji tilts his head to the side, considering the response. "I suppose that makes sense. The valley will be there tomorrow, but the wedding won't."

"How sentimental of you," Shuuichi dryly says. More so because, infuriatingly, he's right.

"I'm not soulless, you know."

"Because you've bound the youkai equivalent to it to your service."

Seiji's lip quirks up. "Venturing into comedy now, are we?"

"No," Shuuichi says, resuming his descent. "Factual reporting."

Seiji laughs. He catches up to Shuuichi. "Actor, exorcist, comedian, reporter. What can't Natori Shuuichi do?"

"Avoid you, apparently."

Seiji doesn't say anything after that, but the silence is not one for want of anything to say; it falls on them like a living thing. Shuuichi wonders if he'd crossed a line ambiguous in their already ambiguous whatever. He doesn't think he did. He steals a glance at Seiji and sees his expression is pensive, his eye downcast: watching the steps as not to fall? In thinking over what Shuuichi had said? In disquiet of the ruins they've become?

The polite thing would be to take it back. He can't, of course. These inevitable encounters have a truth to them. What truth it is, though, Shuuichi does not know. Their paths had long diverged but somehow keep crossing, tributaries to a river, a force grander than they. Maybe they're supposed to meet, time and time again. Maybe they are always meant to be reminded that despite the memories broken like glass beneath their feet, their differences are too similar for them to stray far from each other, their pasts anchoring them tightly to shore.

He's searching for something to say when Seiji looks up at him, smile inscrutable.

"Since you like Shinto weddings so much," he says, "I'll be sure to invite you to my own."

There is something to his voice that Shuuichi cannot name, either. It's something subtle, perceived only because he knows Seiji's voice for the language it is. His smile with its knife-like point and gleam is painful to look at. He averts his eyes and still it cuts. It cuts deep.

Is it painful on Seiji, too?

"When," Shuuichi starts, finding his voice and finding it rasping, "are you getting married?"

Seiji's laugh is too light. "I'm not currently engaged. I meant when I inevitably am, in the future."

"To a nice exorcist girl from a nice exorcist family?" He can see her in his thoughts: pale and red-lipped, lashes full, eyes demure, thick hair braided back, charmed paper in her slender hands. Well-bred, well-mannered. Undeserving of Seiji because she could do better. Because he could do better.

"If it'll strengthen the Matoba clan's power, yes."

"A political marriage. What year do you think it is?"

"It seems exorcists cannot part with the past."

Shuuichi's fingernails gouge crescent moons into his palms, wanting them to be painted in blood. Needing it. A distraction from the suffocating emptiness resonating in his head. Something tangible to pinpoint as the source of pain. Something that isn't Matoba Seiji causing him to be so lost yet again.

The Matoba clan has persisted through the ages by power and blood. New leaders rise at their predecessors' deaths, on and on forever more. As long as there are youkai, the Matoba clan will there be. And as long as there is a world, there will be youkai.

Seiji will one day need a wife because he will one day need an heir, a child to pass his family's legacy to. They'd never spoken about it until now – but, upon retrospection, it was implied in Seiji's very existence, his very surname. Shuuichi wears glasses to help him see youkai and he had not seen this essential trait of bare humanity until now.

He swallows with what little spit he has. "I already pity the poor girl," he says. He picks up his speed, almost stumbling down the steps, needing to leave everything behind him.

And there Seiji goes, gaining a step on Shuuichi. He half-turns his head, the side where his eyepatch keeps his face hidden, but it does not feel that way. Its warding character is like a monstrous eye directly on Shuuichi – or perhaps it is his real eye cutting through its flimsy protection. "Jealousy is becoming on you."

Now Shuuichi actually stumbles. Seiji's hand, arrow-quick, wraps around his wrist, steadying him while branding him. " _Jealous_ _y_?" he asks. _Becoming?_ he thinks.

Seiji releases him but keeps his hand poised around Shuuichi's wrist. And then he grips him, pulling him fiercely close, Shuuichi holding on to him instinctively for balance.

"Yes," Seiji says, or maybe he just mouths it; his voice has dropped to a whisper sneaking past his thin lips lined with a pattern Shuuichi knows by tongue. "Jealousy."

Just for half of half of a second, his eye had flicked to Shuuichi's mouth. But it had flicked. And it had brought that murkiness to its dark depth, that unnameable hunger – unnameable not because neither knows what it is. They do. It is unnameable because to speak it would undo them.

Shuuichi steals his hand away and takes a few steps back, breathing in quick and cool lungfuls of high mountain air. "Cut the crap. What do you want?"

He has to focus both his eyes on Seiji's single one. It should give him an advantage: two to one. And Seiji is a step below him, looking up at him for once. Yet on some other day, if his stubbornness had not hardened on his skin like armor, the intensity in Seiji's gaze could have gotten him on his knees.

"I want you, as an exorcist, by my side."

Fists, curling. "And you're not going to have that."

"I know," Seiji says, low and even. He tucks a lock of hair behind his ear, glancing skyward. "But you asked."

Shuuichi huffs, curving around Seiji to take the next step down.

He's kept on the same level as Seiji by his hand darting around his wrist again.

"Shuuichi," Seiji continues, somehow even lower, eye daring to meet Shuuichi's. "Do you think I can't love anyone?"

He wrings his hand free, distrusting this conversation and the beat of his heart. "I don't think, I _know_."

"Is that so." He doesn't even phrase it as a question.

"Did _you_ think," Shuuichi says, a deluge at the ready, "that whatever we had, if we ever really had anything at all, was- _love_?" He falters before he can say that dreaded word. "That wasn't love. I don't know what it was, but it wasn't love. We don't have that in us. Not then, not now, not ever. You're going to tie your life down to someone you won't and can never care for because of your stupid priority for the clan. That's all it ever is, isn't it? The clan. Expanding its name. Using me- using any means to do that. I think your own name is the closest thing to love you're capable of feeling. Everything always comes down to Matoba."

"Shuuichi-"

"No." Has he always sounded this plaintive? "No, you can't call me that anymore. You can't keep orbiting me with whatever schemes you've got unsaid. I'm not going to join you. Are you trying to wear me out with your presence hoping I'll change my mind? I'm not, Seiji. Matoba-san. Whoever you are. Whoever you want to be to me."

" _Shuuichi_ -"

" _Please_ shut up," he pleads, digging his hands onto Seiji's hair, brusquely drawing him in to a kiss as rough as the steps they stand on, perhaps with as much love too, but there is a feeling in the way he holds him and the way Seiji drops his parasol to hold him back that stone does not possess. It isn't a kind feeling – Shuuichi's fingers bunch tightly onto Seiji's hair, Seiji's nails bore into his shoulder blades possessively. It isn't hatred, as much as Shuuichi wants it to be. He would not kiss him and Seiji would not return it, now and in yesterdays gone, if they hated each other.

But it's not love. It isn't. It isn't.

How pathetic they must be, two of the mundane world, simple as the gods had made it, who don't know anything about themselves and who refuse to do anything about it.

Shuuichi presses harder onto Seiji, as if doing so will get the sound of that coveted truth out of him, but Seiji turns his head aside and Shuuichi bites air. But they remain close; at this lack of distance, Seiji's disrupted breathing is as loud as a storm, the flush on his raw lips a fire.

Seiji looks at him askance. "You might be right."

"What about?"

Seiji extricates himself from Shuuichi. He bends to pick up his parasol, to dust himself off. And as he stands, a smile curls on his face that Shuuichi, insides curdling, wants to claw out until one of them bleeds. "I can't love anyone."

He descends the stairs on his own, Shuuichi watching him shrink and diminish and disappear.

**Author's Note:**

> wish i could say the title came from my excellent brain but i adapted it from a book about reference books i'm reading. yes, i'm the kind of person who reads a book about reference books And thinks 'that's a raw line. i'm going to make it gay'


End file.
